Woo! Fax time!

In the words of good old Homer Simpson: "Stupid bug! You go squish now."

The bug is MR. JONATHAN (JOHN) AUDU, or possibly MR. THOMAS MBEKI, because he used both names.
The stupid part is because he contacted me twice in the course of a twelve-hour span, using two different letters and two different names about two different foreigners working for two different corporations, one in Nigeria, one in South Africa. One died in a 'ghastly' car accident, the other in a mere 'car accident'. I'm kind of wondering if they supposedly smacked into each other, that'd at least be entertaining.
At stake: $25,000,000 USD of foreigner money, since the people in the emails died without leaving wills.
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml - know it, love it, use it.

Silly man. Silly, silly, stupid man. You go squish now.

Today's pulp survival tip is #47. Never drink anything whose source you haven't verified. If possible, never drink from anything except your own canteen.

*ahem*

Hanna? What a dumb name for a tropical storm. It hasn't even got an H on the end. What, did they name it after the wildlife show host? He's cool, but I wouldn't think of him as someone to name a tropical storm for. Maybe Hurricane Irwin, but not Hanna...

Thenk yew. This concludes our attempt at resolving drought conditions through mockery.

On another note - cadhla? We have a competitor. Today I saw a truck for an HVAC company somewhere in the 908 area code. The company is called Weather King. Time to go to war, I think.

"Wow, DSHR courses are a lot cooler than I thought."

Been taking the home-study portion of the course on how to drive/handle/work in Emergency Response Vehicles (ERVs) for the Red Cross. The remaining portion is an orientation in the ERV itself, plus a defensive driving course (them trucks is big). Receptionist printed up cards for everyone who wanted to become an ERV driver today, from the software that tracks who's had which courses and who knows what.

One problem: the National software in question misspelled the name of the course. I got a course card for "ERUs: Ready, Set, Roll!"

Having visions of being licensed to invoke Tolkien supreme beings as part of getting people the hell out of my way on the way to a fire.

The end of an era,

at least for me...

I've been MUSHing for a very long time, thanks to a chain of circumstances that began with a 386SX-25 named Rex as my primary college computer. (It couldn't handle graphical internet stuff, so text-based games and stuff became much more attractive.) I've been playing World of Darkness RPGs almost as long - I still remember a friend of mine holding first edition Vampire out and urging me to have a look. (First character: a Malkavian named Portia who deeply and sincerely believed that in a prior life*, she had been Theseus of Athens, and that her current incarnation as a scholar and state as a vampire made her the perfect candidate to bring back the Cretan bull dance. What could the bulls do? Kill her?) I got Werewolf when it was at its most blatantly irritating, both in terms of 'page XX' and in terms of 'we're aiming this at 13-year-old boys and we're going to use the most simplistic arguments possible for our political agenda within the game', and I loved it. I used a friend's copy of Mage extensively until 2nd Ed came out, when I bought my own. I spit teeth and screamed in rage when Changeling appeared to be nothing more than an attempt to combine a poor understanding of legend with a poor understanding of the CCG business model, but managed to enjoy the good bits anyway. I've been playing these games off and on since. . .

In senior year of college, with an online friend of mine named Brian, I created a character one day and helped him create one. I don't know what made us decide on it, but between the two of us, we decided that what the online world needed was the equivalent of Penn and Teller. I got Penn, the Ragabash; he got Teller, the Theurge. They were werewolves. They were magicians. They were dedicated to the proposition that most people were just too damn willing to believe and deserved to have the rug yanked out from under them repeatedly until the impact of cranium on concrete brought them to their senses. They wound up at a MUSH called Twist of Fate, fooling Mages into thinking they were Technocracy, Technocrats into thinking they were mortal, and mortals into thinking they were Real Magickckck Slingers(tm).

Eventually I had to leave ToF, I don't remember why, and retired my char. So did Brian. Eventually I found another place for him and applied for him as he had been before gaming at Twist of Fate, and he was accepted. His life story required very little changing, just a few tweaks to remove the Rom character from ToF who'd ostensibly helped him escape the Silver Fang enraged at what the Fang believed was a Veil violation**. He ran for Canada instead of a different state, and arrived in Toronto alone.

Metro: Toronto by Night became my favourite MUSH for quite some time and I had an ENORMOUS amount of fun with this character. He couldn't find the local Sept for ages, a fact not helped by the destruction of the city caern not long before his arrival and the secrecy of the Wendigo who controlled the country caern. He affiliated with Bete long before he ever met the local Garou, and almost wound up in one of their sentai rather than a Garou pack. He met a woman and fell in love and ultimately married her; he found the Sept and joined it, and never managed to join a pack that lasted more than three months***. To his shock and horror, he wound up becoming Alpha of the Sept. Rather less to his shock and more to his delight, he and his wife became parents, and Coyote showed up at his kid's Baptism of Fire.

I've played him for four years now. More, if you include the time at other MUSHes that was rewound over. I've done... pretty much everything I think I can do with him online. In a tabletop game he might be fun, but I've been thinking about this for a while. I just don't see how to do anything new with him except have him Wyrmed, and that's not something he'd do ICly or anything I'd be willing to do. He's still fun, but it's all stuff that's been done before, and that's the signal that it's time to stop. He and his wife and child will be heading out for parts as yet undecided - possibly somewhere like Macau or Hong Kong, possibly somewhere in the Andes, possibly somewhere recommended by his crazy Armenian grandfather the fabric trader. Who knows. I still have to settle the details of all of this with the staff at Metro, because I don't want to screw anyone over by departing and there's still plots going on. I plan on playing there after he's gone, preferably a nice ig'nint mortal who can start from square one. I'm just not gonna play this character, probably my second favourite Garou character ever, any more.

David Niles Grishin, Speaks-Like-Microsoft, Glass Walker No-Moon Adren, signing off for. . . who knows what?

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*Please note: in a prior life. She wasn't a bunnyMalk who suffered from Oo I Think I'm So-And-So syndrome; she had an obsession with ancient Greece and with Theseus in particular.
**Three words: Siegfried and Roy.
***Players who ran characters in packs with him vanished or lost net access, including my friend Brian, whom I have not heard from since last November. Brian, if you're out there, please, contact me?